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Grandparents' Garden Grandparents' Garden A project by Stella Xu, YFSI '2020 Background I first learned about the Grandparents’ Garden through fellow Yale Sustainable Food Program student and friend, Addee Kim. We were at our friend Lauren Kim’s Knead 2 Know talk on urban food forests in Taiwan, when Addee mentioned the Garden during the Q & A session. At the time, I had just formally accepted my summer internship with the Yale Farm, the beginning of a (hopefully!) lifelong engagement with food systems, food justice, and sustainable agriculture. I knew I wanted to do my independent project on the Garden, even though I had never been there, let alone walked past it. When Covid-19 got much worse in the United States, I struggled with finding ways to connect with the gardeners. People were already on edge, so a stranger walking over and striking up a conversation would likely cause alarm or at the very least, discomfort. Given that many of the gardeners were elderly, I hesitated to conduct ethnographic research face-to-face in the first few weeks of my internship. What follows is a mental and visual roadmap of the many, many conversations with people— from my housemates Emily Sigman and Steve Winter to our next door neighbor Caroline Posner (one of the few younger, non-immigrant gardeners)— that eventually led me to meeting several gardeners, who have their own sections below. This project would not be possible without them, their patience, generosity, and openness to a complete stranger. Aside from those who have a direct connection to the Garden, I am incredibly grateful to Jacquie Munno, Sarah Mele, Erwin Li, Abby Lee, and Mark Bomford for giving me insightful guidance throughout this project period. This project is ultimately the culmination of my journey among a web of interrelated people and communities. My time in New Haven this summer has also given me time to experiment with gardening and growing. I like to think that by doing gardening every day across the street from the Grandparents’ Garden, I was engaging in an indirect form of “participant observation.” By learning and experiencing the challenges of growing vegetables from seed with limited knowledge and resources, I could also manage to understand some of the challenges and delights that my neighbor gardeners were experiencing. Map of the Garden and surrounding areas; Garden areas are shaded with diagonal lines. Introduction Nobody is really clear on when exactly the Grandparents’ Garden started. From all the people I talked to, I received myriad answers such as “since I was a kid” and “I think 2011.” The first published article on the Garden, in the New Haven Independent, describes a dozen Chinese gardeners tending to the plots on Prospect, Division, and Mansfield streets as early as summer of 2010.1 So why was the history of the garden so hard to pin down? In contrast to the vast majority of other community gardens in New Haven that are managed by a non-profit organization, the Grandparents’ Garden has no formal ownership or management system in place. Whereas other community gardens have a staff member or volunteer dealing with who tends to what plot, these gardeners informally pass their pieces of land onto a different family—usually among the same ethnic or linguistic ties— when it is time to leave New Haven. This unwritten process makes for a unique, and often tenuous, system of land tenure that is wholly different from the existing landscape of community gardening in New Haven. The Garden sits in clear contrast to “white-led and professionalized organizations” in the urban gardening sphere with funding support and policy support.2 Furthermore, due to linguistic barriers and a lack of institutional legitimacy, scholarship and knowledge on the Grandparents’ Garden is greatly limited. As Horst, McClintock, and Hoey write, “Working-class and immigrant households have for centuries engaged in growing kitchen gardens and raising animals in urban settings as well as using open space for food production.”3 Established Black, Brown, and Indigenous community gardens and the scholarship that has arisen from them have been instrumental in informing my own research questions. Devon G. Peña’s documentation of the plants grown in LA’s South Central Farm inspired my brief page on the different Chinese vegetables in the Garden.4 Kristin Reynolds and Nevin Cohen’s Beyond the Kale challenged me to look critically at urban agriculture and imagine alternate possibilities.5 I was initially interested in examining mutual aid relationships and solidarity economies, especially in a time of Covid-19, that were present in the Garden. This search proved to be not as fruitful as some of the other unexpected information I later learned, about the Garden’s (and gardeners’) relationship to New Haven and Yale. Mutual aid and exchange still existed among the gardeners, though not in the large-scale ways I had imagined. Paired with the readings we did for the Internship, I realized that community gardens do not always equal food justice. But the complex ways in which the Gardeners related to each other brought up many other interesting questions. This zine roughly splits my ethnography into three layered facets: (1) the Garden and Gardeners themselves, (2) the Garden + New Haven + Yale, and (3) the Garden’s future. I attempt to give a thorough overview of these three facets by including interview transcripts, while incorporating my own analysis and thoughts. Interviews with Chinese- speaking gardeners are translated into English, but there are limitations even with translation. I quote my interlocutors directly, but I can never do justice to the original dialogue in Mandarin and regional dialects. Lastly, the “Grandparents’ Garden” is an informal name, one that I choose to use throughout this zine for ease of reference. I borrow this name from Addee, and from local news articles that highlight the elderly demographic of the Gardeners.6 It is important to note that not all of the gardeners are necessarily grandparents, and even more so, that the Garden is living and transforming even as I conduct my research. Even my usage of the term “Grandparents’ Garden” (rather than “the garden” or “my plot”) denotes my status as an outside observer looking in, since each gardener has their own ways of naming and thinking about the Garden. Muhammad Kaimul Ahsan So, in the past and the beginning, Chinese people started garden- ing. But now, we are also evolving. Chinese, Bangladeshi, there are some Indian families also. I’m from Bangladesh originally. I’m doing research at Yale University. And I’m also starting gardening. (What did you plant here?) I planted strawberries, eggplant, and some peanuts. I also have strawberries, some tomatoes over there and green chili and spinach also. Lots of things. Those seeds, I bought from the garden and the rare ones, I brought from my country. (How did you get started gardening?) I live in Ivy Manor. At the beginning, we didn’t notice that this is Yale property or that some Yale graduates and their parents were cultivating this place. And then we got an email from Yale Hous- ing people. They emailed us that whoever wants to do gardening, there is some space that you can do gardening. At the beginning, I also didn’t know that I could garden here. I’ve been gardening here for four years now. I have kids, but they are not interested in doing this. They are a little afraid of mosquitos, so they don’t like to come here. I’m do- ing it because I need to do some exercise. I start at 5:30 and do it until 8:30. Today, my wife is harvesting some mini spinach.” Gardening Practices The most noticeable feature of the Garden are the numerous trellises crafted from fallen tree branches, which make the plot of land look like an “enchanted forest.”7 The branches are propped up in the shape of a cone, tied together by twine or shoelaces or whatever string-like material gardeners can find, and arranged in rows to support tomatoes or pole beans. Since there is no running water at the Garden, gardeners find different ways to transport and conserve water. Almost every gardener I met used baby strollers to push recycled milk jugs and laundry detergent containers filled with water from a hose across the street. Many of the elders make two or three trips to water all of their vegetables, while those with smaller plots could manage with just one trip. Instead of store-bought mulch, some gardeners use newspaper cuttings, dead leaves, and other recycled materials to retain moisture in the soil. As gardener Yang Shengming explains, “It’s to keep it from drying. It shields the light, so the inside is still wet. Today is too hot.” Yang also shows me his orange pill bottle filled with a white powder. “This is baking soda. This soil originally had lots of pine needles. Last year, things wouldn’t grow. Recently, I found out from the internet that baking soda can dissolve things, so I wanted to try and add some to fix the soil.” Kristyn Leach of Namu Farm asserts that East Asian farming techniques are “more about being place-based and not having a lot of rules.”8 Generalizing “East Asian farming techniques” may be essentializing, but it is undeniable that the grandparent gardeners’ practices do reflect a kind of place-based improvisation, reminding me of the YSFP’s “principles over recipes” mantra. From using the materials at their disposal to working through challenges and without institutional support, the gardeners embody improvisation through their practices.
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